So….there’s talk of Elon Musk reducing his direct role in the Trump government….
There’s also talk that the initial estimates of DOGE “savings” appear to have been wildly inflated.
But before anyone celebrates the first story, or mocks the second, remember that neither involves the most important aspect of Musk’s and DOGE’s 100 days of chaos: the data.
A friend of mine who works in this space warned me in February about the risks presented by Musk and DOGE.
Here’s what he said then—Musk has…
“plugged himself into the personal information of every American. This is a digital coup, embedding itself into the core I.T. infrastructure of federal agencies with little oversight and only selective “transparency.”…
This isn’t just unauthorized access -- it’s a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.
The existential risks here -- financial manipulation, mass data exploitation, and unchecked digital autocracy -- are no longer hypothetical. We're watching a truly unprecedented transfer of governmental power to a private entity in real time.”
He Called It…
As he predicted, we’ve seen weekly stories of DOGE accessing a wide variety of government data, including Social Security, medical and tax data. Two of those most recent examples:
Immigration
“Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department have given DOGE access to a system that contains sensitive data on millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, including their addresses and detailed case histories.”
“DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This…could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants….The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants.
“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data…It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”
Department of Labor
DOL data includes “information about ongoing, contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly.”
A whistleblower recently reported alarming breaches involving this data: “someone had disabled controls that would prevent insecure or unauthorized mobile devices from logging on to the system without the proper security settings. There was an interface exposed to the public internet, potentially allowing malicious actors access to their systems. Internal alerting and monitoring systems were found to be manually turned off. Multifactor authentication was disabled….[I]n the minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in….Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password…”
Musk’s Departure: “Extract and Run”
Given these stories, I circled back with my friend to see what he thought about Musk “leaving” after months of DOGE rummaging around federal government and our data:
I first asked him about the whistleblower story above:
“I still speculate their goal is to siphon off as much data as possible and funnel everything into AI systems designed to automate the bureaucracy. The people they’re hiring (as I said before) are still being mocked, but you can do a lot of damage armed with a modern AI free of restraints with intent to break things….
“It’s hard to speculate more on the whistleblower at this point beyond initial thoughts. But it tells me they probably don’t care that they’re breaking things and brute forcing because the goal is to extract and run.”
I then asked about Musk leaving: “Can you explain what a bunch of tech bros could’ve gained by rummaging around our data for the last four months?”
“Trump’s orbit is always temporary, and I’m not sure Musk expected him to voluntarily nuke the economy. Tesla is in meltdown—he has no choice.
But…they can already declare victory. All evidence points to a data extraction operation. The goal is to ingest critical datasets, train them behind closed doors, then build a centralized “government brain” (an AI platform) that they can license back to the government.”
“It’s been 100 days. They’ve hit labor, treasury systems, veterans affairs, HHS, cloud services used by federal agencies. etc. etc. They likely have hundreds of terabytes of data already in their control. To answer your question, he has what he needs and they can do this without him now.”
So I asked: What are examples of what they can do with all that data?
“This is where speculation can run wild, because they are high-capacity systems. We’re living in the science fiction books I used to read as a kid.
Granting good intentions, they could create this system then hand it over to the federal government to receive proper oversight and be used as a resource for modernizing and centralizing government. Security and transparency would be paramount and would drive the process from here. That clearly isn’t happening.
They could also use it to build complex identity profiles on every entity in the country (individual or otherwise), sort citizens with a Chinese-style patriotism score. Identify causal chains that humans might never see, silently flag people for surveillance—run models to predict their likely activities, create internal/secret preferred risk scores, assign automated threat ratings to individuals, simulate population reactions to new laws/ideas, etc. etc. It’s too much.
But that’s the point. These systems are extremely powerful. The people with the keys can do whatever they want…
But I also don’t want to paint too much of a mustache-twirling villain picture. This is high-stakes improv; they’re clearly out of their depth. It’s executed chaotically. They have retreated on stated goals, Musk wants out and the administration wants him out. We’re entering a recession, the dollar is tanking, even our status as reserve currency is in question. But what will be left in the wake of all this is power asymmetry in this bizarre populist landscape…is an unthinkably powerful tool.”
Day 155 — April 25, 2025
Along the spectrum of autocracy, the arrest of judges is waaaay down the line. Yet that happened in the United States yesterday with the arrest of a Wisconsin judge.
At the same time, news came out that a two-year old US citizen was deported to Honduras, leading to a fiery order by a federal judge. A May 16 hearing will confirm or dispel “our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Needless to say, so much of the future of our democracy currently rests in the hands of federal judges. Let’s hope they continue to hold the line.
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